Troubleshooting

So it doesn’t work…
Or, at least, it doesn’t work as expected.

Below you can find a few hints that may help you find a suitable solution to your problem.

General hints

DaisyDisk is not a general purpose Mac maintenance utility, but it never hurts to ensure your system works properly.

1. Use Disk Utility to verify your disk’s integrity and fix permissions. Using a Mac with a damaged file system is never a good idea, anyway.
2. Restart your Mac. Sounds stupid, but it may help.

If possible, stay away from all-purpose Speed Up Your Mac utilities. Most of them are useless at best and create new problems instead of solving old ones. For general purpose maintenance we could recommend Onyx, a free and useful tool. Just don’t blame us if you misuse it.

Timed Out Error

If you keep getting Timed Out error messages while scanning your disks, try the following:

1. Check local disks with the Disk Utility. Timeouts on your Mac HD often indicate problems with permissions or file system integrity.
2. Reduce the number of files on your SMB shares. Accessing an SMB folder with a large number of files requires a lot of time for any application (not just DaisyDisk). Reducing the number of files in the folder by archiving them may solve the problem.
3. Try accessing the resource via a different protocol or scan it locally. Some network resources deny access after receiving a significant number of requests required by scanning.

DaisyDisk and Remote Desktop

It looks like headless Mac servers do not load graphic drivers that are needed for applications, powered by Core Animation (all of them, not just DaisyDisk). As a result, portions of the UI appear black or do not refresh.

Plugging in an external display solves the problem. You can also try hacks that emulate displays, but do it on your risk.

Hidden space

Scanning disk as administrator may be helpful once you have problems with large amounts of disk space inaccessible to normal users.

Some backup tools are known to leave garbage in /Volumes folder. Check it with the Terminal app.

Nothing above helps? Contact support and we’ll take a closer look at your case.